Introducing Jaina Stormborne, the Fire hero in Codex. Jaina fights with a magic bow that shoots flame arrows, and she’s reckless and aggressive despite Master Midori trying to teach her some patience. She may have fallen in with the wrong crowd by joining the Blood Anarchs, but she fits in quite well.

A lot of the power in the Fire spec comes from how inherently good direct damage is. While some specs have to play fair and deal their damage through combat, Fire can often point that damage wherever you want. That starts with Jaina Stormborne herself:

When she reaches maximum level, Jaina is extremely dangerous. From that point on, she’s dealing 3 damage every turn, without spending any cards or any gold to do it. She can use that as part of a control-based plan where she tries to kill whichever units you play and destroy whichever tech buildings you have. Or, she can close out the game with this ability because your base is a building too, meaning she can deal 3 damage to it (15% of its max HP) every turn. That adds up fast when you factor in all the other firepower.

The red starting deck comes with a burn spell, Scorch.

That’s a bit expensive, but in the early game it can kill a pesky unit or hero and late game it can deal the last 2 damage you need for a win. Jaina’s own spells in the Fire spec are better versions of that:

Ember Sparks lets you deal 1 extra damage relative to Scorch from your starting deck AND it lets you divide that damage across multiple targets if you want. Meanwhile Flame Arrow deals a whopping 4 damage to any unit or hero. That’s enough to kill most heroes and lots of units. Even though it’s a powerful control spell, it’s also a great finisher to win the game with because it does 3 damage to buildings too.

At tech I, both Lobber and Firebat are solid threats:

Lobber gets to deal 1 damage immediately, while Firebat gets to deal 2 damage each turn if you’re willing to wait for it (he doesn’t have haste) and pay for it. Also, I hope you appreciate that there’s a firebat in this RTS-themed game.

Fire’s tech II cards are all dangerous in different ways. Bamstamper Lizzo is a very solid control card:

He gives you a respectable 5/3 body AND he usually destroys a unit when he arrives. That can help you dominate the board. Meanwhile, Doubleshot Archer gives you some control, but while also damaging your opponent’s base:

She won’t kill anything the turn she arrives like Bamstamper Lizzo can, but when she does attack, she’ll likely kill one thing and not take any damage (because of her long-range ability) and she’ll ALSO deal 3 to your opponent’s base. Those double shots are so efficient that your opponent just can’t let you have her more than 1 turn.

Want to rain down fire on EVERYTHING? You can:

As you think about how devastating it can be to deal 1 damage to everything an opponent has (on a flying unit that’s hard to attack), factor THIS in:

Now each Molting Firebird is dealing *2* damage to everything. Doubleshot Archer deals 4 to their base, Bamstamper Lizzo deals 4 damage when he arrives, even your lowly Scorch now deals 3 damage. And that’s with just one copy of Hotter Fire—remember, upgrades stay in play indefinitely. You can have two of these upgrades in play if you dare to dream!

That brings us to possibly the most dreamy Fire spec card of all: Firehouse.

Got a problem with Fire? Call the Firehouse, except they will just start more fires instead of putting any of them out. Firehouse is one of those cards that seems like it must be a typo or something. It can potentially wipe your opponent’s entire board if you set it up correctly. Everything with 2 HP or less is dead as soon you reach your next ready phase, and you can combine other damage with Firehouse to possibly kill the rest too. In actual practice, it’s not quite so easy to pull off a devastating Firehouse massacre, but hey, we can dream.

In case you want a more reliable win condition, get to tech III and bust out this ridiculous dragon:

Between the damage the dragon himself deals and all the free fire spells he lets you cast every turn, you’ll roast their base in no time.